PILOTS vs FEATURES:
Here at writingXstructure, I dissect the merit of features through the lens of what I like to call the four pillars of storytelling:
Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth
Emotional & Literal Question
Uniform POV
And
Aristotle’s cause and effect structure.
Great movies hit a home run in all four of these areas.
But what about a television pilot? How do we break down the structure of a pilot so that we can understand it and become masters at writing television?
Well… The first thing you need to understand is this:
Writing a pilot is TEN THOUSAND TIMES harder than writing a feature.
That is because your parameters are so severe, -- the box you are contained to write in is so small -- and yet to capture an audience and grab them so tightly that they will return episode after episode-- your universality has to be so enormously vast and palpable that they have no choice but to return- because the experience you create is one they can’t find anywhere else… and they want it.
That paradox is what makes great television SO great and SO difficult to accomplish.
Think about it: when you write a feature your audience agrees to be with you for a finite period of time, all the world is suspended, and for two hours they are all yours. Movies are romance with whole minutes to woo your audience with artistic visuals and action filled montages and deep, soulfull thematic conversations on park benches.
Television is speed dating. At the end of one round you’re either madly in love or you’re disgusted and never going back again.
The one main component that every single great television show has is: CLARITY.
CLARITY OF CONCEPT/ PROOF OF CONCEPT
What so many writers don’t understand when they set out to write a pilot is that they’re not just writing a script… they’re pitching a concept. Without clarity of concept for your entire show on the page, you have no pilot. You only have a mini feature that hasn’t ended yet.
Clarity of concept is also referred to as “the franchise” of the show. What is the machine that you’ve created that me, as the buyer, is going to get five seasons of television out of? Or, on network television: 100 episodes.
If I took a poll on what the top television shows of all time are, I’d undoubtedly get answers resembling something like:
The Wire
Breaking Bad
Game of Thrones
The West Wing
Seinfeld
Friends
The Office
The X Files
I will even expand this notion to include limited series and anthology shows like:
True Detective
And some of my NEW favorite television shows are:
Ozark
Euphoria
Peaky Blinders
Schitt’s Creek
In case it’s not totally clear, let me demonstrate proof of concept for each of these highly successful shows. Take a moment to reflect on how these concepts are duplicated in every single episode over and over again so that even though each episode has a different story line, their concept and universality is the same:
NETWORK
The West Wing - The ins and outs of President Bartlett and his staff and the decisions they will be forced to make day in and day out in order to uphold their duty to their country.
Seinfeld - Famous for being pitched to the network by Jerry Seinfeld as a show about “nothing”. The genius of this concept is that each and every episode is literally about the most mundane things, that seem to equal nothing and yet are so specific to every day idiosynchracies that we relate on a deep humane level. The show about nothing was really about holding up a mirror to the insanity of our every day small little lives… and validating every viewer in all our glorified weirdness.
Similar:
The Office - A day at The Office with lunatic boss MIchael Scott is never a dull day. Throw in a love triangle and a hugely conflicting cast of strong personality office employees and bam. Two hundred episodes.
Friends - The concept was the theme: you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends who become family. Every single episode challenged the bonds of friendship that these five friends struggled to upkeep while juggling the logistics of living in New York City. We had friends like them and we miss that time in our lives, before we had our own families, when our friends were everything. Friends is a nostalgia show wrapped in a sitcom. A coming of age walk down the hallway between the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood. The writers did their job so well that we knew when Friends was over… our young adulthood would be over too and it would be time to grow up.
The X Files - A believer and a non believer seek the truth in trying to uncover the mysteries of life beyond our planet leaving both of their firlmy held beliefs a little more shaken after every episode. 200 episodes. 209 to be exact.
CABLE:
The Wire - A five season show that will dive deep into the different facets of extreme corruption in the city of Baltimore, told through the point of view of Baltimore PD’s Wire Tap of the city’s most dangerous crime ring led by Avon Barksdale, his associates and his rivals.
Game of Thrones - An adaptation of George RR Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” series that follows the different houses in the kingdom of Westeros in their battle to sit on the Iron Throne and what they will do to win it.
Breaking Bad - The rise and fall of Walter White. Full stop. Fucking brilliant from the fade in of the pilot to the fade out of the series finale. Unrivaled in its brilliance to up the ante in every season until the only place left to go was down. I could write for a long, long time on Breaking Bad alone.
Peeky Blinders: the rise and fall of the Shelby family gang of criminals. The Peeky Blinders are based on real crime family who ruled Birmingham at the turn of the last century so the concept of the show followed their biographical history.
Ozark - In my opinion the best new show on television. What the evils of capitalism do to husband and wife team Marty and Wendy Bird, starting out as fish just trying not to be eaten and evolving into super predators, doing worse and worse things until their goal is to rule the whole ocean.
True Detective - a murder mystery unraveled but more than that, an existential peek into the threat all of us feel in trying to uncover the mystery of our own existence. If you’re going to write a limited series it better be about something other than just the murder mystery itself.
Euphoria: Degrassi on meth. A deep look into this new generation of teenagers and the obscene levels of addiction they are forced to battle on a daily basis- everything from actual drugs to sex to love to social media dependancy. Each episode focuses on a different kid in town and what addiction they are battling - a problem of the episode blended with a serialized love story combined with a mystery of the series. Just gorgeous from start to finish.
Schitt’s Creek: A family of rich, selfish, self obsessed assholes, move to a small town and over the course of six seasons learn how to be good people… find love in others and learn to love themselves. Oh and by the way f*kn hilarious!!
There is so much more to talk about in terms of what goes into creating a show and then writing a pilot… and yes the four pillars of storytelling go into pilot writing as well, even though the structure is set up differently than a feature… but until you can tell me what your concept is with total clarity of how you will write it into every single episode for five seasons… you’re not ready to write.
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